Jason Evangelho
, ContributorNews and reviews from the crossroads of PC gaming & consumer hardwareOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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We’ve just scratched the surface. Right now we’re at 20% of where we want this to ultimately be. Right now it’s email, but I view this as more of a platform play. Think about if you get other forms of communication into this mix. Imagine if all the photos people share with me across email, Facebook, Twitter, all show up in my photo stack.

And we do have some social integration in here already. If you click on a contact, it’ll pull in their recent statuses from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. What I love is that we pull in some semantic data around it, so you can see people in common which is really cool.

Alto's Inbox View (click to enlarge)

Business users won’t give Alto a second glance without Exchange support. Is it coming?

Yes. What I love about building a product with feedback mechanisms is all the user suggestions we get. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get is ‘I want to use Hotmail in this, and I want Exchange support. I will pay you guys if you have this working with Exchange!’ The initial response has been very positive; it tells us we’re on the right course.

Will Alto always be a web app, or will we see a dedicated client and mobile app?

Right now in order to offer a product, you have to cover all screens. We’re also working on native versions for iOS and Android.

One feature I enjoyed about Inky is the ability to easily unsubscribe from a newsletter. You click an icon, and it scours the email for the best unsubscribe method and does it for you. Any plans for something similar in Alto?

We did tremendous amounts of studies on this. We’ve had AOL employees testing it internally for 6-8 months, and we went down to Los Angeles to do user testing. What we found is that everyone has their own strategy around stacks, but the one constant we found: Everybody has a crap stack! So we want to build Alto’s smartness into the crap stack. ‘Everything in here, the user doesn’t want. So we’re just going to do the necessary work on the back-end to expunge it.’

We spend the majority of our time triaging to get to what we want in our inbox. ‘Delete, delete, delete.’ With stacks, what’s important to you now is visually there.